Artist to Watch: Harumi Klossowska de Rola Sculpts a Mythical World of Animals
For her debut at Acquavella Galleries’ New York locations, the Swiss talent puts forth work that seems both ancient and urgently contemporary
This fall, Manhattan’s Upper East Side gains a menagerie of new inhabitants: animals and mythical creatures from the imagination of Harumi Klossowska de Rola. “I am not very trusting of humans or modernity; I find refuge and connect with animals,” says the artist, who has immersed herself in studying native customs. “As I am myself a modern human creature, a mix of Asia and Europe, I am very much aware of the many paradoxes I incarnate.”
For her debut at Acquavella Galleries’ New York location, the Swiss talent brings these contradictions to the fore in sculptures that seem both ancient and urgently contemporary. As if embodying the passage of time, Klossowska’s work has an air of having been unearthed. Cast in bronze or carved from alabaster or wood, and at times embellished with gold leaf, the pieces carry a patina reminiscent of a millennia-old artifact recovered from a long-gone civilization.
Klossowska herself has lived between cultures and histories. Born in Geneva and raised in the Swiss Alps, she is the daughter of the painter known as Balthus and Japanese artist Setsuko Klossowska de Rola—a legacy, Klossowska says, she has “partly ignored and sometimes ran away from in a very animal manner.”
Growing up, she traveled extensively, and the art she surrounds herself with now infuses her work. Japanese Shinto traditions and ancient mythology are among the inspirations that filter through her oeuvre. She also draws from early cultures such as the Incas and the philosophy of wabi-sabi, forming a sculptural practice that resists easy categorization.
Working from her rural studio in Rossinière, Switzerland, Klossowska observes the rhythms of the universe with keen sensitivity, creating representations of fauna distilled to ethereal expressions of their presence—the mystery of a gaze, the elegance of a posture, the silent intelligence of a creature in its own realm. “I found that I must not be too specific about what I feel and how it comes out and becomes shape. Some animals, or more rarely plants, just come uninvited and populate my thoughts,” she says. “I am very much inhabited by the idea, maybe the dream, of an untouched environment, of a nature without us, or very little of us, of a natural world that dictates us, not the other way around.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2026 Late Fall Issue under the headline “Narrative Hook” Subscribe to the magazine.